News blog + Argentina | The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/news/blog+world/argentina
Indexen-gbGuardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2015Sun, 02 Aug 2015 20:59:55 GMT2015-08-02T20:59:55Zen-gbGuardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2015The Guardianhttp://assets.guim.co.uk/images/guardian-logo-rss.c45beb1bafa34b347ac333af2e6fe23f.pnghttp://www.theguardian.com
Who first owned the Falkland Islands?http://www.theguardian.com/uk/blog/2012/feb/02/who-first-owned-falkland-islands
The dispute over ownership of the south Atlantic islands has been blowing hot and cold for several centuries<p>As Britain and Argentina sound off yet again about their rival claims to sovereignty over the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands" title="">Falkland Islands</a>, it would not be completely fanciful to blame the Borgias for a dispute that has been blowing hot and cold for more than 300 years.</p><p>More precisely, the root of the problem can be traced to the celebrated <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera" title="">Bulls of Donation</a> by which the Borgia pope <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Alexander_VI" title="">Alexander VI</a> (1492-1503) exercised what medieval doctrine still told him was a God-given right to divide between Spain and Portugal all the distant lands that European navigators were starting to discover. The lines he drew (they were revised) went straight through what is now modern Portuguese-speaking Brazil, leaving most of the South American mainland to the Spaniards, whose conquistador armies had not yet arrived in Mexico or Peru.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/blog/2012/feb/02/who-first-owned-falkland-islands">Continue reading...</a>Falkland IslandsAmericasUK newsArgentinaWorld newsThu, 02 Feb 2012 15:35:04 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/uk/blog/2012/feb/02/who-first-owned-falkland-islandsDavid Parker/AlamyStanley, the Falkland Islands capital. Photograph: David Parker/AlamyDavid Parker/AlamyStanley, the Falkland Islands capital. Photograph: David Parker/AlamyMichael White2012-02-02T15:35:04ZWikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updateshttp://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/nov/30/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates
• Latest leaks show China ready to abandon North Korea<br />• Prince Andrew's sweary outbursts at media and French<br />• Hillary Clinton leads international condemnation of leaks<br /><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates">Today's WikiLeaks US embassy cables live updates</a><p><strong>7.15am:</strong> Here's a catch-up on the current batch of leaked US diplomatic cables: </p><p>It is too early to say precisely what damage the WikiLeaks revelations will do. Many of us suspected that Arab leaders were even more alarmed than the West at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. It does not surprise me that they would be supportive of a military attack if all other pressures fail. The fact that this is now public may bring home to the international community and, in particular, Russia and China, that the UN Security Council must agree very heavy sanctions and pressure on Iran if the whole Middle East is not going to be disrupted by conflict.</p><p>But regardless of whether the spotlight of unauthorised publicity might, occasionally, help rather than hinder, the deliberate leaking of sensitive dispatches and diplomatic cables is highly damaging in what is already a very dangerous world.</p><p>If these comments by Prince Andrew are accurate - and of course we don't know that yet - then clearly it's of public interest that they are out there, so that he can judge whether he is performing the role well and government can make that judgment as well.</p><p>Prince Andrew will need to think through if he is actually carrying out this role to the best of his abilities.</p><p>Beijing called on the US to &quot;properly handle&quot; the emergence of the diplomatic cables, but sought to play down the issue in its first response to the release.</p><p>Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a regular press briefing: &quot;We do not want to see any disturbance in China-US relations.&quot;</p><p>Louis Susman, the current US ambassador to London wrote: &quot;PM Brown, in a one-on-one meeting with the ambassador, proposed a deal: that McKinnon plead guilty, make a statement of contrition, but serve any sentence of incarceration in the UK. Brown cited deep public concern that McKinnon, with his medical condition, would commit suicide or suffer injury if imprisoned in a US facility.&quot;</p><p>The ambassador says he sought to raise Brown's request in Washington with Obama's newly appointed attorney general, Eric Holder. But the plea got nowhere.</p><p>Le Monde is preparing to release documents relating to France in the coming days. The paper said these will give US view of Paris's anti-terrorism policy, Washington's interpretation of the suburb riots of 2005 and France-US relations.</p><p>Today the paper's website has explored French negotiations over taking former Guant&aacute;namo Bay bay detainees. It says <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2010/11/29/wikileaks-quand-la-france-negociait-avec-les-etats-unis-le-sort-de-detenus-de-guantanamo_1446651_3210.html#ens_id=1446075">Sarkozy's government was keen to make a gesture to help the Obama administration in order to improve Paris-Washington relations</a>.</p><p>While it is to Brown's credit that he pleaded with the US on behalf of Gary McKinnon, [Tony] Blair's shame is that the rights of people in Britain were signed away and left to special secret pleadings instead of law.</p><p>No one should be sent anywhere without evidence in a local court and where justice and mercy suggest dealing with them at home.</p><p>I remember discussing it with (current Justice Secretary) Ken Clarke in a private meeting that it would be a really good idea for this case not to end up being a political football.</p><p>Although the [extradition] treaty itself is not responsible for the immediate removal of Gary... there was an issue for senior politicians to make representations.</p><p>Now, you don't need to know anything about graft in China, much less world leaders, or Wen Jiabao, to know that $10,000 not only wouldn't get the job done, it'd be viewed as an insult and an automatic disqualification from this any other mining contract. So I'm going to go out on a limb here: there's simply no way that happened. None. Zero. Zilch. Now, is it possible that Wen has a &quot;relationship&quot; with Wanxiang? Sure. But not the one described in the cable.</p><p>And this gets to something that I think is going to become increasingly, uncomfortably obvious as more and more of these cables are released: US State Department employees in overseas posts often don't know very much about the countries in which they're posted</p><p>Of course there must not be firewalls that prevent senior intelligence analysts and their bosses from seeing and sharing sensitive information. That does not mean a troubled 22-year-old in Baghdad should have access to secret State Department cables from all over the world. Surely there is a way to create a system that can do the former while preventing the latter.</p><p>&quot;We haven't gone after this guy, we haven't tried to prosecute him, we haven't gotten our allies to go out and lock this guy up and bring him up on terrorism charges. What he's doing is terrorism, in my opinion.&quot;</p><p>What this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.</p><p>&quot;President Saleh's comments will be translated and used over and over again by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as a recruiting and propaganda tool,&quot; Gregory Johnsen, a leading U.S. expert on the terror organization's Yemeni affiliate, told NBC on Monday. &quot;His statements and those of his top ministers of deceiving and lying to the Yemeni public and parliament … fit seamlessly into a narrative that AQAP has been peddling in Yemen for years. This is something AQAP will take immediate and lasting advantage of.&quot; </p><p>&quot;I don't agree with Secretary Clinton that it's that significant it has torn up the fabric for our diplomacy,&quot; Carter said. &quot;In the future, there's going to be a lot more caution as leaders send them dispatches into the State Department and as our own ambassadors send reports back into the State Department if they suspect that their words might be revealed.&quot;</p><p>Why can't we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can't we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can't we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible? Why can't we warn others of repercussions from assisting this criminal enterprise hostile to the United States?</p><p>It's, rather, a question of whether WikiLeaks are being manipulated by interested parties that want to either complicate our relationship with other governments or want to undermine some governments, because some of these items that are being emphasized and have surfaced are very pointed.</p><p>And I wonder whether, in fact, there aren't some operations internationally, intelligence services, that are feeding stuff to WikiLeaks, because it is a unique opportunity to embarrass us, to embarrass our position, but also to undermine our relations with particular governments.</p><p>Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, acknowledges the irony of lavishing praise on Begg, who was alleged by the US to have been an instructor at an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. In a cable labelled &quot;To Hell and Back: Gitmo ex-detainee stumps in Luxembourg&quot;, Stroum wrote that Begg was &quot;barnstorming&quot; through Europe. In January this year, he met the Luxembourg government and spoke at a public meeting.</p><p>&quot;Mr Begg is doing our work for us and his articulate, reasoned presentation makes for a convincing argument. It is ironic that after four years of imprisonment and alleged torture Moazzam Begg is delivering the same demarche to GOL [the government of Luxembourg] as we are: please consider accepting GTMO detainees for resettlement.&quot;</p><p>Access to the WikiLeak's Cablegate page, as well as certain Chinese language news articles covering the topic, have been blocked in the country since Monday. Other articles from the Chinese press that are accessible on the web appear to only concern the US response.</p><p>Guess what word is most on the minds of US diplomats in 2010? Yup – Iran. &quot;Iranian&quot; is prominent in the mix too as is &quot;nuclear,&quot; which should explain the interest. Fascinatingly &quot;Turkey&quot; is more prominent than &quot;Afghanistan,&quot; possibly due to the country's key location in supporting US and Nato operations in both theaters of conflict.</p><p>So, while the cables released by Wikileaks will give new meaning to the words &quot;modern history,&quot; and, while we now know more than we ever did before about the State Department's recent diplomacy, it's also worth remembering that State Department cables don't contain everything. And, yes, there will still be secrets in the future.</p><p>The latest cache of US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks contains warnings that Pakistan is rapidly building its nuclear stockpile despite the country's growing instability and &quot;pending economic catastrophe&quot;.</p><p>But before the latest document dump it appeared that a grand total of three stories, comprising 4108 words of the 35,662 words of 2010 [Washington] Post stories about which Wikileaks was the primary focus, actually required anything approaching a close read of any of the Wikileaked documents.</p><p>Such collaboration by major media organizations across international borders — both in agreeing to work together in publishing the material and in agreeing what material should be kept out — is new for journalism.</p><p>&quot;I know of no international efforts like this, a global kind of collaboration,&quot; said Mark Feldstein, a professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs... &quot;It's unprecedented and to be commended. The volume of the material that WikiLeaks obtained is unprecedented, so to tackle a subject this complicated is going to take more resources. And just as everything else has gone global – crime and multinational corporations – so we are starting to see the beginning of a more global investigative journalism,&quot; he said.</p><p>Reeling from disclosures of sensitive diplomatic messages, the State Department has disconnected access to its files from the US government's classified computer network. The move dramatically reduces the number of employees inside the government who can see important diplomatic messages.</p><p>A State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, said the decision was temporary, at least until workers correct what he called &quot;weaknesses in the system that have become evident because of this leak.&quot;</p><p>Assange said that all the documents were redacted &quot;carefully.&quot; &quot;They are all reviewed and they're all redacted either by us or by the newspapers concerned,&quot; he said. He added that &quot;we have formally asked the State Department for assistance with that. That request was formally rejected.&quot;</p><p>Asked what his &quot;moral calculus&quot; is to justify publishing the leaks and whether he considered what he was doing to be &quot;civil disobedience,&quot; Assange said, &quot;Not at all. This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction.&quot;</p><p>I think WikiLeaks is an important organisation that's doing something the world needs. But like other human-rights and humanitarian organisations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, it needs to lay down some clear, public ethical guidelines about how and why it does what it does. And it needs to bring in a board of directors of people from a wide range of countries, backgrounds and institutions to review the organisation's conduct on ethical and other grounds.</p><p>In late 2008, Blackwater Worldwide, already under fire because of accusations of abuses by its security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, reconfigured a 183-foot oceanographic research vessel into a pirate-hunting ship for hire and then began looking for business from shipping companies seeking protection from Somali pirates. The company's chief executive officer, Erik Prince, was planning a trip to Djibouti for a promotional event in March 2009, and Blackwater was hoping that the American Embassy there would help out, according to a secret State Department cable.</p><p>&quot;If Goldman Sachs executives can make $50 million a year and then run America's economy in Washington, what's so different about what we do?' they ask.&quot;</p><p>As Republicans come into power, they're going to explore what can be done. They can't do much. But let's be honest. The quest to find some way to define Assange's group as terrorists is not about fighting terrorism. It's about indulging the fantasy, well put by Cornell law professor William Jacobson, of Assange being hunted down like a Robert Ludlum villain and possibly &quot;killed while resisting arrest.&quot;</p><p>Prince Andrew used his royal position to demand a special briefing from the Serious Fraud Office weeks before launching a tirade against the agency's &quot;idiotic&quot; investigators at a lunch with businessmen in Kyrgyzstan.... Soon after, believing he was speaking in private to a group of sympathetic British businessmen, he appeared to condone bribery, and scorned the work of the SFO's anti-corruption investigators in investigating the Saudi royal family.</p><p>Assange's details were also added to Interpol's worldwide wanted list. Dated 30 November, the entry reads: &quot;sex crimes&quot; and says the warrant has been issued by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. &quot;If you have any information contact your national or local police.&quot; It reads: &quot;Wanted: Assange, Julian Paul,&quot; and gives his birthplace as Townsville, Australia.</p><p>The head of the Bank of England privately criticised David Cameron and George Osborne for their lack of experience, the lack of depth in their inner circle and their tendency to think about issues only in terms of their electoral impact, according to leaked US embassy cables.</p><p>Mervyn King told the US ambassador, Louis Susman, he had held private meetings with the two Conservative politicians before the election to urge them to draw up a detailed plan to reduce the deficit.</p><p>Internal Tory polling found Osborne lacked gravitas with the public, partly due to his &quot;high-pitched vocal delivery&quot;. As a result, Cameron, not Osborne, made the special address on the economic crisis to the party conference in the autumn of 2008.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/nov/30/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates">Continue reading...</a>The US embassy cablesUS foreign policyWikiLeaksNorth KoreaSouth KoreaChinaPrince AndrewArgentinaPrince CharlesWorld newsAsia PacificTue, 30 Nov 2010 07:16:20 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/nov/30/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updatesAndrew Winning / Reuters/REUTERSBank of England governor Mervyn King: Cameron and Osborne lacked experience. Photograph: Andrew Winning/ReutersVincent Thian/APGoogle China's former headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: Vincent Thian/APLeon Neal/AFP/Getty ImagesJulian Assange speaks at a press conference in London, September 2010. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty ImagesKCNA/EPAThe latest diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks show that China is ready to accept a reunified Korea and regards North Korea as a spoiled child. Photograph: KCNA/EPAKCNA/EPAThe North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il (left) talks with to the Chinese president Hu Jintaop during a visit to China in May. Photograph: KCNA/EPAMatthew Weaver and Richard Adams2010-11-30T07:16:20ZNewsdesk notes for Tuesday January 8http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2008/jan/08/newsdesknotesfortuesdayjan
In our daily audio programme, Jon Dennis and guests discuss Nazis in South America, the New Hampshire primary election and public sector pay<p>Westminster correspondent <strong>David Hencke</strong> on the revelations in the Guardian today that cabinet minister Peter Hain failed to disclose thousands of pounds worth of donations during his Labour deputy leadership campaign. David says the prime minister, Gordon Brown, will be furious.</p><p>• <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=136697329&amp;s=143444">Subscribe free to Newsdesk, via iTunes</a></p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2008/jan/08/newsdesknotesfortuesdayjan">Continue reading...</a>US elections 2008World newsPoliticsPeter HainArgentinaScienceMusicCulturePublic sector payTue, 08 Jan 2008 12:00:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2008/jan/08/newsdesknotesfortuesdayjanJon Dennis2008-01-08T12:00:00Z